>>What's your Favourite FF story by you?"'Hero' in FF #285, the one with the kid who sets himself on fire. I hate the fact that the Beyonder is in it. You look at that issue and you'll notice a woman doctor, Dr. Janet Darlin, is prominent in the first part of it and then suddenly disappears. That's because I was halfway through that issue when Shooter told me it had to be a Secret Wars Crossover issue and I had to be the Beyonder in it. So the Beyonder got to do what the doctor was supposed to do which was to show Johnny the kid's shrine to the Human Torch. Ralph Macchio once wanted to reprint that story and I actually offered to redo the Beyonder pages for free. I was willing to redraw them and put in the doctor as originally intended."

With IDW’s upcoming reboots of Micronauts and ROM, I thought it would be fun to take a look back at these series. I’ll admit up front, that I
never collected the Micronauts. I had a handful of issues, mostly from the
first 12 issues, and picked up the title every once and a while, particularly
when there were crossovers.

In the mid-1970s, MEGO licensed the rights for the Microman line
of action figures from the Japanese toy manufacturer Takara and rebranded it as
the Micronauts.

“My son [Adam] got a few of the MEGO Micronaut toys from
Christmas in 1977,” recalled creator/writerBill Mantlo in Mantlo – A Life in Comics. “I thought they had great
potential and wrote a proposal, detailing the directions I foresaw for these
tiny aliens from a sub-atomic Microverse, and handed it to [Marvel’s
Editor-in-Chief] Jim Shooter.”

”A month later,” Mantlo further explained in Amazing Heroes
#7, “we had preliminary photographs of the entire Micronauts line. I was, to
say the least floored. I had already begun extrapolating, based on just the
four original figurines, a whole series of concepts. Now here, in front of me,
were literally hundreds of additional figures, thousands of new suggested
concepts… in effect, a whole world in need of a rationale for being.

Original Micronauts Concept Art by Bob Hall

“Space Glider seemed to suggest a Reed Richards nobility, an
aspect of command, of dignity. Acroyear, faceless, his armor gleaming, a
fantastic sword clenched in his coldly metallic hand, seemed to hearken back to
a warrior Mr. Spock. For some reason Galactic Warrior seemed insect-like – I
could almost hear clicks and whistles and strange scraping noises interjected
into his speech.

“But Time Traveller… there was mystery there, glimmerings of
cosmic vastness, intimations of knowledge and space and time all having been
broken down and reassembled to produce something entirely new… unexplainable…
different.”

And the rest as they say, is Marvel Comics history.

With an eye-catching cover by Dave Cockrum and Al Milgrom,
the Micronauts hit the newsstands in early 1979.

This micro-cosmic new series was the first Marvel Comics
full-time outing for penciler Michael Golden. His art was impressive with creative
and dynamic panel arrangements and solid inks by Joe Rubinstein.

It’s not hard to see the influence that Star Wars had on the
series with its rebellion against a tyrannical foe, the black armoured Baron
Karza (Darth Vader archetype). Other similarities included the Enigma Force /
The Force, Dog Soldiers / Stormtroopers, Biotron and Microtron / R2D2 and C3P0.

Mantlo adeptly introduced quite a lot in this issue, from a
civil war, rebellion, and a micro-galactic empire.I really liked the neat twist with Rann and
Biotron returning home 1,000 years after they took off on their exploratory journey
across the Microverse to discover their world had radically changed under the tyrannical
rule of Baron Karza. Although Rann’s over-the-top chauvinism could have been
left in the 1950s.

The world-building was impressive and I was a bit
disappointed that they had left the Microverse at the end of the issue. But, at
the same time, I can see the reasoning behind having the Micronauts visit the
Earth, to ground them in the real world and get involved in the Marvel Universe.

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